The Minnesota Film Festival showcases independent movies made in the Northland and around the world. Lift Movie expert Michael Gendron shows us a few highlights from the weekend in Duluth.

The festival started with Mississippi Speed Record: An Epic Adventure.

It’s from wife and husband duo Amy Robin-Maier and Alex Maier. Epic is a fitting word as we follow a group of paddlers and their support team’s quest to paddle the entire 2,340 miles of the Mississippi River in a single 23-foot canoe, aiming to set a new Guinness World Record for the fastest time down the river. The documentary kicks off right here in our backyard in  Lake Itasca, Minnesota, as we sit with these men through exhaustion, jubilation, tears, cheers, and so much more in their week-long journey through the beauty of nature and our cities that have sprung up around it. 

You can watch this one in your own home right now, the filmmakers have a link to both buy a stream of their film or a DVD copy at their website. 

Up next, we have the French thriller Misericordia

A young man begins to stay at the house a beloved former employer who passed away, and his presence leads to familial drama, passions to arise in unexpected places, and murder.    What begins as a slow burn, dreamlike drama slowly evolves into dark comedic absurdity and I’ve had few experiences quite like it, but I was pretty enthralled the entire time.  We did have some early walkouts at my screening, and this movie, pretty purposefully, does not invite the audience in right away, making you feel like you’re lost in a daze, but I promise everything does come into focus, and the focus is much funnier than what the setup promises.  Right now, Misericordia is playing at some specialty theaters across the country, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it making a streaming debut for the Criterion Channel in the coming months.

Finally, I want to return to the Northland for a movie with deep area ties: Venus of Mars. 

This documentary, from Emily Goldberg, originally came out in the early 2000s  and covers the titular Venus. She is a Duluth-born lead singer of the Minnesota cult band All The Pretty Horse. The film follows her journey as an openly transgender artist in the Minnesota music scene. 

However, even more than that, this is also a love story about Venus’ wife who married a person they knew as Steve in the 1980s and the difficulty of learning how much change someone is willing to accept in the person they love.   I didn’t grow up in Duluth or Minnesota at all, so it was fun for me to see this city I now call home how it was decades ago. It was also fascinating to see how much language and the conversations around the trans community have changed and stayed the same. But what I found most fascinating is that central relationship between Venus and Lynette, who do seem like an odd pairing on the surface. They don’t show away from the fact it wasn’t easy on the relationship for Venus to present herself to the world. It’s a challenging and raw documentary with some great music and sights, both familiar and out of the world.  “Venus of Mars” is currently available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime video.